Are Crime and Collective Emotion Interrelated? A "Broken Emotion" Conjecture from Community Twitter Posts. (April 2023)
- Record Type:
- Journal Article
- Title:
- Are Crime and Collective Emotion Interrelated? A "Broken Emotion" Conjecture from Community Twitter Posts. (April 2023)
- Main Title:
- Are Crime and Collective Emotion Interrelated? A "Broken Emotion" Conjecture from Community Twitter Posts
- Authors:
- Lan, Minxuan
Liu, Lin
Burmeister, Jacob
Zhu, Weili
Zhou, Hanlin
Gu, Xin - Abstract:
- A neighborhood's social cohesion, referring to the emotional and social connection of people within it, tends to have an influential impact on its crime level. Traditional approaches to measuring social cohesion and collective efficacy are mostly interviews and surveys, which are usually costly in time, money, and other resources. Big social media data provides us with a new and cost-effective source of such information. We believe the combination of spatial and contextual information of geotagged Twitter posts (tweets) can gauge the residents' collective emotions in a neighborhood. The positivity and negativity of these collective emotions may be used to approximate the collective efficacy of the community. Inspired by the broken window theory, we propose a broken emotion conjecture to explain the relationship between collective emotion and crime. To test this conjecture, we collected data on four types of crime (assaults, burglaries, robberies, and thefts) and all public geotagged tweets ( N = 778, 901) in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA in 2013. We extracted innovative variables from tweets' spatial and contextual information to explain community crime and enlighten new criminology theory. Results of negative binomial models show: (1) with necessary socio-economic and land-use factors controlled, the more negative the collective emotion of a neighborhood, the more the crime (except for theft); (2) however, the positivity of the collective emotion of a neighborhood does not have anyA neighborhood's social cohesion, referring to the emotional and social connection of people within it, tends to have an influential impact on its crime level. Traditional approaches to measuring social cohesion and collective efficacy are mostly interviews and surveys, which are usually costly in time, money, and other resources. Big social media data provides us with a new and cost-effective source of such information. We believe the combination of spatial and contextual information of geotagged Twitter posts (tweets) can gauge the residents' collective emotions in a neighborhood. The positivity and negativity of these collective emotions may be used to approximate the collective efficacy of the community. Inspired by the broken window theory, we propose a broken emotion conjecture to explain the relationship between collective emotion and crime. To test this conjecture, we collected data on four types of crime (assaults, burglaries, robberies, and thefts) and all public geotagged tweets ( N = 778, 901) in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA in 2013. We extracted innovative variables from tweets' spatial and contextual information to explain community crime and enlighten new criminology theory. Results of negative binomial models show: (1) with necessary socio-economic and land-use factors controlled, the more negative the collective emotion of a neighborhood, the more the crime (except for theft); (2) however, the positivity of the collective emotion of a neighborhood does not have any statistically significant influence on crime. These correspond well with signal detection theory in psychology. The proposed broken emotion conjecture is supported with data from Cincinnati and its general applicability should be tested in other regions. … (more)
- Is Part Of:
- Social science computer review. Volume 41:Number 2(2023)
- Journal:
- Social science computer review
- Issue:
- Volume 41:Number 2(2023)
- Issue Display:
- Volume 41, Issue 2 (2023)
- Year:
- 2023
- Volume:
- 41
- Issue:
- 2
- Issue Sort Value:
- 2023-0041-0002-0000
- Page Start:
- 528
- Page End:
- 553
- Publication Date:
- 2023-04
- Subjects:
- neighborhood crime -- tweets -- collective emotion -- collective efficacy -- social cohesion
Social sciences -- Data processing -- Periodicals
Computers -- Social aspects -- Periodicals
Microcomputers -- Periodicals
Sciences sociales -- Informatique -- Périodiques
Micro-ordinateurs -- Périodiques
300.285 - Journal URLs:
- http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ssc ↗
http://ssc.sagepub.com/ ↗
http://www.sagepublications.com/ ↗
http://firstsearch.oclc.org ↗
http://firstsearch.oclc.org/journal=0894-4393;screen=info;ECOIP ↗ - DOI:
- 10.1177/08944393221113210 ↗
- Languages:
- English
- ISSNs:
- 0894-4393
- Deposit Type:
- Legaldeposit
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